Bio

Dr. Pichora-Fuller is a full professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. She is also an adjunct scientist at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, an adjunct scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest in Toronto, and a guest professor at Linköping University in Sweden.

She completed a BA in linguistics at the University of Toronto (1977) and an MSc in audiology and speech sciences at the University of British Columbia (1980). She worked as a clinical audiologist and then the supervisor of audiology at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto where she was involved in research on hearing rehabilitation. She completed her doctoral studies in psychology at the University of Toronto (PhD, 1991).

Dr. Pichora-Fuller combines her clinical experience in rehabilitative audiology with experimental psychology and has earned an international reputation for her interdisciplinary approach in linking research on auditory and cognitive processing during communication in everyday life. She is now applying her lab-based research on communication in healthy aging to try to find solutions to the communication problems of the increasing number of older adults who suffer from both hearing and cognitive impairments.

Her work has been funded by the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. She is actively involved as the expert on hearing in the Clinical Working Group and the Psychology Working Group for the Canadian Longitudinal Study of Aging.

She has been a president of the Canadian Association of Speech Language Pathologists and Audiologists (1984–1987), and she served on the executive boards of the Canadian Acoustical Association (1998–2002, 2011–present), the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (1997–2003), and the Canadian Academy of Audiology (2002–2004), and she was the Canadian representative to the International Society of Audiology (2004–2010). She is presently a cochair of the World Congress of Audiology to be held in Vancouver in September 2016. She serves on the editorial boards of theInternational Journal of Audiology and Ear and Hearing.